v1z

Things were different back when the PC was young. Video games were barely an industry and the PC itself was a mess of devices with bad driver support, incompatibilities, arcane configuration files and very little in the way of help. Yet despite these crippling limitations some of the most unforgettable games were made that endure to this day. The games were simple at first, abstract. Pixels and beeps somehow built entire worlds for us to play in. But while the visual and aural presentation was primitive, mastery of the game required much higher levels of skill, intelligence and perseverance than today's average AAA title. I believe this is where I fell in love. These games were almost always from small independent companies. They had to be, there was no industry to speak of. From this primordial soup emerged companies like Microprose, Sierra On-line, Bullfrog Productions, Westwood Studios, Origin Systems, Brøderbund Software, Codemasters, The Bitmap Brothers and Maxis. Every single one of these was established in the '80s. Entire genres were born overnight. Strategy games, puzzle games, platform games, side-scrolling shooters, vertical-scrolling shooters, racing games, sports games, adventure games, RTS games, flight sims, space sims, 4X games, sandbox games, the list goes on forever. The sheer creativity and innovation shown during these years is astounding. And the best was yet to come. We witnessed the golden age of PC gaming in the mid-'90s. Every game seemed to push the limits of what our primitive equipment could do, every title a triumph of engineering, innovation and art. Slowly though the industry became a business and the indie developer was edged out. The corporate monoliths bought up the talent and the small studios. They started using words like 'deadline', 'console port', 'target demographic', 'paid review', 'franchise', 'mainstream' and 'holiday season' with alarming regularity. It was the end of the golden age. Focus shifted to the consoles in the intervening years, budgets swelled to eclipse even big Hollywood movies and innovation slowed to a couch potato crawl. The industry became a slave to the game reviewer's 10 point scale. A crude attempt at quantifying the value of a work of art. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, indie developers got a new lease of life. In the span of three short years XBox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, Steam and the App Store were all launched. In the case of the app store, the limitations of the medium once again became a source of innovation. All that creativity and innovation came storming back onto our desks, living rooms and pockets. New companies we'd never heard of and solo developers were once again building new things. Minecraft, Journey, Frozen Synapse, World of Goo and yes even Angry Birds are proof of the return of the indie. But building games is an expensive business. Gamers are fickle and the need for big explosions, photo-realism and celebrity cameos runs deep. For an indie developer to compete with a big name studio they need big money too. And that's where crowd-funding comes in. Kickstarter and other independent versions of it are allowing fans to pre-pay developers to build the games they've always wanted to play. It feels like a perfect storm. A conducive environment for the sort of games we know are possible but haven't been made for lack of corporate sponsorship. I have a soft spot for science fiction and space-based games. This year has seen such an enormous variety of games in that vein that it is difficult for me to see it as anything but a resurgence in quality PC gaming. From FTL to X-COM Enemy Unknown. From Endless Space to Star Citizen. Even the venerable David Braben has thrown his hat into the ring with Elite Dangerous. I have been playing games on the PC for 25 years. Nostalgia paints those early years in vivid colors of excitement and wonder. I am once again filled with the same emotions when thinking about the future. We are once again, at the cusp of a golden age. I can't wait to see what's next.

That's it. You now have Google Maps back. It runs in Safari and it isn't nearly as nice as the old app but it'll have to do until Google releases a native client.

I heard that Steve Jobs had died on the morning of October 6th. My mum, also suffering from cancer, died the same morning. They were the same age. The outpouring of grief over Steve's death washed over the internet with tidal force, but I was dealing with a far more personal loss. As a result, I am much less emotional about his death than I might have been. I appreciate the loss his family have suffered with the clarity that only shared experience can provide, but the only thing I feel is a selfish fear that Apple has lost it's rudder. There are two reasons why I use Apple products. The first is because they, more than any other company in this industry, are sweating the details. A hundred little things that would seem superfluous, insignificant or "good enough" are lovingly implemented, refined and polished until they shine. Apple places high value in craftsmanship. As someone that earns their living with these products I really appreciate that effort. The second is difficult to describe but is perhaps just another facet of that craftsmanship. Apple's products are infused with a design sensibility and aesthetic that is hard to articulate. It's in the feel of a Mac keyboard or in the heft of an iPhone. It's the way everything, hardware and software, works in concert for a better user experience. That stuff is really hard to get right. It requires vision, focus and taste. As anyone that works in design will tell you, the vision of a design very rarely gets better when subjected to a committee. Focus requires discipline, ruthlessness and judgement to know what is indispensable and what is inconsequential. Taste cannot be taught, you either have it or you don't. All this and so much more flowed from Steve. Therein lies the rub. I don't believe these traits can be institutionalized. It takes a dictator, not a parliament, to create these products. There are many incredibly talented people at Apple. Tim Cook is a man that epitomizes the role a CEO should play. Apple under Steve always built products that people loved using, but Cook made them cheaper and at a scale that allowed Apple to flourish. One need look no further than the latest offerings from Dell, Samsung, ASUS and HP for proof that Jony Ive's designs are the best in the world, worthy of being copied shamelessly. I don't know what Phil Schiller does, but Gruber assures me he is indispensable. These employees and hundreds of others are undoubtedly the ones responsible for 99% of the work that goes into the shiny new objects that Apple builds. All of them have been given stewardship of Apple. But I fear Apple doesn't need stewards. Apple needs a king. We will not be able to gauge the impact right away. By all accounts (including Isaacson's biography of Steve) there are at least 5 years' worth of amazing products already in development. Obviously Steve will have had a declining influence on the final output, but they were still conceived while he was around. What happens after that is anyone's guess. If anyone ever had the capacity, the personality and the sheer unmitigated gall to build a company in their own image, that person was Steve. Alas, only time will tell if he succeeded.

Computers are crap at figuring out what I want to read. Half the reason I subscribe to blogs and follow people on Twitter is to discover new things that I would otherwise never find. This list of trusted subscriptions/follows has been built over time, lovingly maintained and brutally culled to distill what I consider to be the highest quality hyperlinks from a sea of unworthy impostors. There is nothing special about this, everyone I have met that understands how this stuff works has some similar index of people they trust to provide grade-A content for daily consumption. We are in effect selecting editors for our own personal web digest. Several very smart people and many smart companies (Google included) have been trying to build an engine capable of discerning the quality of digital content. At it's heart this is what Google's search engine does. It identifies content that is of the highest quality in relation to a specific set of keywords (your search query). As I've written in the past, knowing how to search is a real skill and one that must be taught. Google probably has the perfect answer to your question but you have to be able to phrase it right and Google has to have it indexed right. Clearly this does not always work out and it is the reason sites like Mahalo exist. Mahalo attempts to throw humans at the problem (and does a pretty good job of it) but you still need to know what you're looking for. Discovery is difficult on sites like Mahalo and damned near impossible on Google. Which brings me to the App Store and Apple's recent hire: Matt Casamassina (IGN's veteran Nintendo editor). His role is to manage the editorial content on the App Store. I gather this amounts to drawing your attention to the gems that are otherwise buried at the bottom of the pile. As anyone who has tried to use the App Store to discover content will tell you, it's like searching for a needle in a haystack. Having an editor whose job it is to review and rate games with a presumably unbiased and highly trained eye is exactly what the App Store needs. But is it any different for the web at large? I consider an unedited App Store to be analogous to sites like Digg and Reddit. The App Store (and Amazon as well) has a rating system that roughly equates to the voting system on Digg and Reddit, ditto for the comments. The point is it's democratic, so every idiot on the internet has the same say. What we need is to be able to pull over our editors from Twitter/Facebook/RSS and only see votes from them. What we need is a reputation bias that skews all these votes and comments so I only see the ones that I (or people I know) care about. It effectively edits the web and adds a new dimension to relevance. Oddly enough I think Google is the most likely place for something like this to work. Google already knows who your friends are and what pages/feeds you are reading. Getting more data is only a couple of Twitter API/Facebook Connect calls away. We could have search results that tell you if your friends/follows clicked on any of the links on the page, or better yet only show you links that they interacted with. Imagine the live feed on that thing. That's the real social web.

I've been to the German Bakery with old friends many times over the course of my time in Pune. I haven't been there recently but I drive past it virtually every day. Yesterday terrorists planted a bomb there and it killed (at last count) 8 people, and injured several more. So, this is terrorism close to home. Reactions from the social networks (which always have the drama dialed up a couple of notches) are along the lines of "I can't believe this would happen in my city" or "The cops failed miserably". Really? This is the reality of living in the world today. While you're not so likely to be killed by, oh I don't know, the Bubonic Plague, you could be attacked by a terrorist. If you expect the police to catch every terror plot that some sick mind dreams up, you would live in a police state. You would lose the freedoms you hold dear and the same people clamoring for the police to do more would be the ones screaming that they have too much power. The balance between security and freedom is precarious and swings both ways. I think we (India) do a pretty good job of balancing those two ideals. The cops were there quickly and seem to be far better prepared than we give them credit for. The government has moved swiftly and clearly the lessons of the Taj have not been forgotten. I call that progress. Any place in the world worth living in is a place worth targeting. The reason these places are worth living in is because they value an individual's freedoms. Removing those freedoms makes the people sad and hands victory to the terrorists. The other prevalent sentiment in everything I have read on the TwitBook (or Faceter, if you prefer) is one of helplessness. "Is there anything we can do besides post empty words on social networks?". Yeah, you could go out and celebrate Valentine's Day. If you genuinely want to help defeat terror and terrorism the answer is simple. Don't get terrorized. For a terrorist to succeed, he must deliver terror. If you don't get scared he is impotent. By being afraid we are all willing contributors to terrorism. The likelihood of dying (especially in Pune) from a road accident is several orders of magnitude higher than getting blown up by a bomb. One could even argue that a few bus drivers have malicious intent. Yet we don't call them terrorists, because we don't get terrorized. The unfortunate truth is that if you're unlucky enough to be there when this sort of thing happens, you will die. Is your need for safety greater than your need to enjoy your life? A life you don't live is still lost.

After a couple of years without a dedicated Windows box (I used my previous MacBook Pro for everything) I got a new PC when Microsoft released the public Windows 7 release candidate ultimate evaluation download version thingamabob doohickey. The rig was built primarily so I could catch up on all the games I missed out on during my self-imposed sabbatical from the platform (thanks, in no small part, to the terrors of Windows Vista). Secondary applications include it being my .NET development environment which barely sees any use any more and more recently it has also morphed into a file-server/RAID. For the next couple of months the days were full of work on the new MacBook Pro and the nights were a flurry of Fallout 3, Mass Effect and Team Fortress 2. I have had to run OS X and Windows side by side and shuffle between them before. It is jarring when I switch from one to the other: things are in the wrong place, I keep trying to trigger Expose or get to the desktop by using Active Screen Corners, finding applications in the goddamn Start menu takes an age, I stare blankly at the Control Panel trying to figure out what the hell the icons mean (they renamed Add/Remove Programs for God's sake), the hideous system tray stretching out to infinity chills my very soul. You get the point. What I realized during this heavy-duty play is that much of this annoying nonsense that Windows XP humbly began and Windows Vista took to unfathomable depths was magically fixed in Windows 7. In my view the last good operating system out of Redmond, WA was Windows 2000. That is until, they switched back to actual version numbers. Microsoft, true to form, fixed Vista by flat out copying OS X. Now, contrary to the traditional Mac fanboy's reaction to this, I am a a firm believer in stealing everything you can get away with. After all, Apple is no stranger to this sort of "borrowing" of ideas. Remember when they ripped the still-beating heart out of Xerox PARC and sold it as Mac OS back in 1984? So the new Taskbar in Windows 7 looks more like the Mac OS Dock than the old Taskbar. You can even rearrange the icons while the program is running ala OS X. I don't use the Start menu any more, and even then I've taken to using it like I do Spotlight on the Mac. Even the system tray has monochrome icons now, I wonder which other OS uses monochrome icons in the tray? And look! moving your mouse into the bottom right corner shows the desktop just like Active Corners! You don't quite get Expose but hovering over an application icon in the Taskbar allows you to see the windows that are open in the app. It's a nice touch (that Snow Leopard promptly copied, by the way). It is also stable. Sure apps crash and I've seen a couple of blue screens, but really I've seen about the same number of grey screens on my Mac. Compatibility with older apps hasn't been much of a problem for me. Games have all worked really well. I can't remember having downloaded any drivers other than the usual video card stuff. UAC is still a little annoying but it seems to behave itself and doesn't constantly ask you incredibly stupid questions. In other words, Windows 7 is what Windows Vista should have been in the first place. It is the first time since Windows 2000 that I have enjoyed using a Microsoft OS. And that boys and girls, is what a good operating system is all about. Making your computer fun to use by being easy, intuitive and responsive. I'm not giving up my Mac any time soon but at least I don't cringe if I have to work in Windows any more.

That's it! Nice and easy. For those interested in the actual output resolutions, the answer is it depends on the source resolution. By and large the iPhone/iPod size will try to constrain the width to 640 pixels. Apple TV will attempt to get close to 720p and Computer will attempt to get close to 1080p.

Somehow this slipped under my radar. Apparently both Mozilla and Webkit have gained experimental support for WebGL. WebGL is going to expose OpenGL ES 2.0 (the same version of OpenGL you find in an iPhone) in JavaScript to be rendered inside a canvas tag. This is without a doubt, the most exciting thing to happen for web-based games ever. It ends up being a standards based, platform agnostic, hardware accelerated rendering method bundled as an extension to JavaScript, using a tag that is already part of the HTML 5 standard. This is a huge piece of the puzzle that is going to allow the creation of web-based 3D games that can take advantage of hardware acceleration. So which pieces are missing? Not too many as it turns out. New implementations of JavaScript in both Firefox and Safari are very fast, making render loops and input capture entirely possible within the browser window. Video and audio have both got standards support in HTML 5. The only thing I can think of that's missing is server initiated communication and peer to peer networking that would be necessary for real-time multiplayer games. Yeah you can poll a server making it possible to have multiplayer turn-based games or even real-time games where latency isn't an issue. For 3D shooters and MMOs however, I would wager the networking piece is still mighty important. Can't wait to get my hands dirty with this stuff.

Replace IIS / Apache with the appropriate filenames and you're done. The .p12 file can be directly imported into the Certificates MMC Snap-In on Windows for use in IIS. The command works on any system that can run openssl, including Mac OS X.

It uses one stylesheet for everything less than 7 and another for IE8 specifically. Works like a charm, hopefully until IE9 comes along.

The clever peeps at Typekit have managed to fix both problems in one fell swoop. By working with the type foundries directly, they have managed to gain licenses to distribute fonts over the web. They've also taken great pains to obfuscate the fonts they are distributing. More importantly for us lowly web designers, they've made this stuff ridiculously easy. Choose the fonts you want (236 options as of right now), get a snippet of JS and Bob's your uncle. All the fonts are compatible with Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1+ and IE 5+ (!). I just got my beta invite and am going to be reworking both this site and ActivElement to use my newly acquired library. Can't wait to get my font on.

This reduced the amount of time needed to manageable proportions and therefore caused a minimal service outage.

Details are sketchy but Google is finally throwing their huge sombrero into the Operating System ring. After years of surveying the competition and developing online versions of all the popular office applications, Google is now going to tackle the foundation of the PC platform. We know it will be a new windowing system that will run on a Linux kernel. It will also be completely open source (the GPL wins again). There are several obvious things that will happen here. Google is going to put it's considerable marketing muscle behind getting Netbooks to use Chrome as the default instead of various other flavors of Linux. Microsoft is going to push these same vendors to use Windows 7 instead. Google is going to price this thing rock bottom, in all likelihood it will be a free download. Couple that with Snow Leopard's ridiculously low upgrade price and it becomes clear that this OS cycle consumers are going to be the big winners. I have long maintained that the only thing stopping Linux from becoming a viable desktop OS is that design (UI/UX or otherwise) doesn't work by committee. But the community is perhaps the single most important part of the open source movement. By putting Google designers in charge of figuring out the windowing system Chrome is probably going to be the first linux flavor to be genuinely polished from a UI perspective (Even though Doug Bowman might disagree). There is one big problem though. I can't use it. Not as my primary OS anyway. Google say the only way developers will build applications for it is through web technologies, taking a page out of Apple's iPhone 1.0 marketing spiel. Given enough bandwidth you might be able to get away without access to the internals of the PC but as long as there is a need to run compiled code for applications/games like Photoshop or Fallout 3 this is not going to be my OS of choice. It will however be perfect for any number of people that just want a computer that does their email and web stuff. Throw in the occasional flash game for good luck. Cower in fear Microsoft, this is the moment Balmer has been sweating for years (literally). Maybe Microsoft should sue Google for monopolistic tactics. After all, you can't install a competing web browser when the OS is the web browser.

It started with a failed time machine backup. I had just bought an Airport Extreme and decided to plug my time machine drive into the USB port on the Airport. About 20% into the backup, time machine failed with Error -8062/Error -36. It failed on multiple files and I had to exclude them from the backup before it would move forward. Wondering what the hell was going on I tried to copy one of these files. Finder couldn't copy it either giving a rather generic Input/Output error. At this point I started thinking something was seriously wrong. The first thing I did was verify and repair permissions using Disk Utility. It found errors, and said it fixed them, but when I verified again the errors were still there. Not very helpful. Next I tried the much vaunted DiskWarrior. At $100 it isn't exactly cheap but it came highly recommended. In order for DiskWarrior to scan your disk it shouldn't be the boot drive. A bit of a problem since my MacBook Pro's main drive was the one that failed. Using my other "Mac" (wink wink, nudge nudge) I used the nifty Target Disk mode of the MacBook Pro to mount the drive. DiskWarrior found something and said it was fixed, but I wasn't convinced. My paranoia was now in top gear and refused to let me rest after DiskWarrior's all clear. I decided to buy Drive Genius 2  which offers a low level surface scan (also $100 but offers a competitive upgrade from DiskWarrior for $75). When you buy Drive Genius they give you a link to a bootable DVD image (unlike DiskWarrior that mails you the DVD, seriously Alsoft, get with the times). This DVD allows you to side-step that pesky boot disk problem. Unfortunately my MBP's SuperDrive was on the blink. Enter my trusty 3rd generation 40 gig iPod. Using Disk Utility I restored the downloaded Drive Genius image onto the iPod and booted up my MBP using it. Drive Genius started doing its thing and almost immediately discovered bad sectors on my hard drive. It was slow going so I decided to leave it on all night just to see how many errors found. In the morning it was still at only 9% scanned with over 100 bad sectors. Clearly this disk was breathing its last breath. So, I have a hosed time machine disk because in moving from plugged in to my mac to plugged in to my airport, the old images were wiped off the disk in order to support backup over the air. I have a primary disk that is failing big time and probably not capable of giving me a solid backup. Luckily for me, this is not quite as bad as it sounds. While time machine is nice and does a decent job most of the time, I don't trust it too far. I use SuperDuper for real backups and I have had that going fine for a very long time. Push comes to shove, all my data is also backed up on Mozy in case a fire or something happens and everything in the vicinity of my computer dies. Yesterday my Mac came back from having its drives replaced. I booted it in Target Disk mode and plugged it in to the other Mac. Opened Disk Utility, mounted my SuperDuper incremental backup and hit restore. 3 hours later everything starts up perfectly and I am back where I began. No fuss, no drama. I love it when things work the way they are supposed to.

I recently attended the first show of Them Clones' promo tour for the launch of their debut CD. The band have a bunch of great songs that they've been massaging carefully for a very long time. The result is a polished set of tracks and a really strong and tight live show. Everything went great at the Hard Rock, Pune and I have a feeling the show would have continued for at least another hour if it wasn't for the ridiculous 11pm closing time imposed by the Maharashtra government. After the show was wrapped I overheard a guy complaining to the bartender. Let me break it down for you. This guy is the quintessential (read cliché) Indian rocker, complete with a goatee, long hair, Sepultura t-shirt, dirty jeans, the works. His rant is probably painfully familiar to the band members (and managers) of any Indian rock band. It went something like this (I'm paraphrasing because I was several beers in at this point): "What was that shit, man? How can I get into the music when I don't know any of the songs? When they play big places like this they should only play covers". That statement right there encapsulates everything that is wrong with your average Indian "Rock Fan". Our asshat at the bar there showed up for a free show, promoting an album and expected to hear covers. He has no respect for artists trying to create instead of regurgitate. He has no feeling of pride or ownership for local talent. He has no concept of the fundamental building blocks of good rock and roll: A band cannot survive, let alone grow, without its fans (even if it's your 2 friends from school). In any part of the world where great rock music happens it begins with the local fans: The small core audience that cheers, adores and provides sexual favors and drugs to the aspiring rock Gods. That entire culture is missing completely in the Indian rock scene from what I can tell. Until that happens bands will become great despite being from India rather than because they're from India.

Ashton Kutcher's victory over CNN is somewhat symbolic. Ashton called it the "changing of the guard" and proof that the web is a viable and already powerful media channel. Like the election of President Obama wasn't proof enough. One could argue that it is easier for Ashton to reach an "internet-savvy" population of people since he was campaigning ON the internet, or that by buying in to the challenge CNN pushed enough people to vote for the underdog. All of it doesn't matter, victory was claimed and conceded. What happened afterward is actually more interesting, because Ashton went on Oprah. The number of twitter users, already growing at a monstrous pace, has seen the biggest boost in history. Twitter is mainstream. So of course, there is the inevitable backlash from loyal supporters and early adopters. Is this really necessary with every single thing that becomes successful? Everyone from Green Day to Facebook have had to deal with this bullshit "sell-out" stereotype and it's getting a little ridiculous. I don't even see how having more people on Twitter is a bad thing. Twitter is by it's very nature, completely immune to an influx of people. If anything it improves the service by giving you more interesting people to follow. If you don't like them, don't follow them.

As mentioned in a previous post I dropped my iPhone a while ago and the whack caused a massive crack on the inner screen (the external glass is fine). That crack lead to the liquid crystal display (LCD) leaking liquid, causing weird grey pixel lines to come snaking up the screen. They were originally in neat little one line increments and now they're just doing their own thing. So I traveled to the US. I tried to get my Indian iPhone screen fixed for the princely sum of $200 at an Apple Store. End result: No dice. The Apple Stores abroad are not allowed to replace phones that are not bought in the same country. So much for a world-wide warranty. If you break your phone while traveling you're essentially screwed. On a side note the grey pixels appear to have stopped marching up my screen. In fact some of them seem to have gone into remission and have started working again. I don't know how long they'll stay this way but I hope it'll last long enough for Apple to release their new iPhone.